If you're a single woman on TV who's struggling to make sense of her chaotic personal life, there's a pretty good chance that you're also a doctor. Physician seems to be the career of choice this season for professionally-successful-yet-still-floundering women in their late 20s and early 30s.

On The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling is a competent OB/GYN who, in the first minutes of the show, gets inappropriately drunk at her ex-boyfriend's wedding and ends up riding her bike into a swimming pool. On Emily Owens M.D. the eponymous doc (Mamie Gummer) juggles patients, mean girls and cute doctor crushes. Erstwhile city girl Dr. Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson) continues to be torn between two southern gents on Hart of Dixie's second season.On The Mob Doctor, Grace Devlin's (Jordana Spiro) personal problems stem less from romantic intrigue and more from the fact that she—as the title suggests—is a doctor for the mob. (And of course there's always the perennial dramas of the docs on Grey's Anatomy.)

The single, professionally competent/personally messy woman is a long-running television archetype, from Ally McBeal (lawyer), to Carrie Bradshaw (writer), Liz Lemon (also writer) and Carrie Mathison (CIA operative). As cool, collected and effective as these women may be in the courtroom or while leading an interrogation, outside of the workplace they tend lose their chutzpah—spending much of their time falling for/obsessing over the wrong men and, in extreme cases, cavorting with imaginary infants.

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I'm not arguing that this dichotomy is always negative; in some cases it actually enhances the character. On Homeland, Claire Danes is brilliant as the bipolar CIA agent. The combination of perceptiveness and unhealthy obsession makes Carrie compelling and wholly human. Some critics have criticized Liz Lemon on 30 Rock for becoming increasing infantile and over-reliant on friend and mentor Jack Donaghy to steer her disastrous personal life. But I've always found Tina Fey's exaggerated take on the frazzled career woman funny and charming, even when she's using plastic shopping bags as underwear.

However, the gulf between the characters' competence in the workplace and ineptness in managing their personal lives can be jarring, particularly when the job in question involves life-and-death judgments. I realize doctors are people too, just as prone to off-days and human folly as the rest of us (especially on TV), but when you walk into the gyno's office you'd like to think that she isn't just coming off a bender. Even so, Mindy Kaling is probably my favorite among the current TV lady docs because her character is unapologetically self-involved and refreshingly lacking in nobility. In a funny and frank scene in the pilot, she encourages her office assistant to book more patients with health insurance. So, more white patients, the assistant infers.

"Well, don't write that!" Mindy exclaims. And then under her breath, "but yes."

Adorable as Bilson is on Hart of Dixie, she is TV's least convincing physician—I just don't think that I could trust a doctor who wears formal shorts to work. Surgical intern Emily Owens takes the prize for the most neurotic member of the group. The premise of the show is that working in a hospital is just like high school. While balancing the demands of her job, brainy former social outcast Emily obsesses over her unattainable crush, fellow intern Will. (There's also a nice-guy doctor who will inevitably provide the third side of the love triangle. Entertainment Weeklyquite rightly pointed out that the show is basically Felicity with doctors.) Because we are privy to Emily's internal narration, we know that she is actually thinking about Will's chin dimple while diagnosing a young patient—which is an impressive feat of multi-tasking, but somewhat alarming from a professional standpoint. It's particularly disheartening when Emily, who in spite of her insecurities is charming and capable, spends part of her first day of work hiding out in a stairwell with a cache of junk food because her crush rejected her and her boss yelled at her.

I'm not sure why doctor is such a hot career choice because, with the exception of The Mob Doctor, the profession doesn't really matter. The workplaces on these shows simply provide a backdrop for further quirkiness and romantic entanglements. Perhaps the fact that the female protagonists are capable of providing care and saving lives in spite of their emotional messiness is meant to provide additional depth. If that's the case, it's a dubious and tired message.

Of all the single professional female characters on television, Parks and Recreation's Leslie Knope (government official) is the only one who really rises to the level of role model. Leslie's career isn't just window dressing for the character; her love for her job and commitment to her community is integral to who she is. Much of the show's sunny humor is derived from the character's unwavering optimism and her inability to do anything in small measures—both in her personal and professional life (like when she sends her boyfriend on a Valentine's Day scavenger hunt with more than 20 increasingly complex clues). While Parks and Rec has provided the character with a fantastic romantic storyline over the past couple of seasons, it's a relationship built on mutual respect and admiration.

Leslie represents an upgrade the classic archetype—proving that women on television can be funny, relatable, and quirky without falling to pieces the minute they leave the office (or the surgical table). Just like women in real life.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.